


Bloody Hands

by grayimperia



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Blood, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Crimson Flower, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:28:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21853708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayimperia/pseuds/grayimperia
Summary: Blood sticks. It’s thick and it clings and it makes it very hard for Hubert to return home at night in a decent state.Blood hurts. Sylvain thinks he’d tear out the poison himself and hand it to Miklan if he could.Blood deceives. Linhardt can stand it in theory—in a lab. But when it’s in front of him, pouring down someone’s face, he feels as if every drop of his own blood has drained out of him.-Hubert, Sylvain, Linhardt, and a few drops of blood.
Relationships: Caspar von Bergliez/Linhardt von Hevring, Edelgard von Hresvelg & Hubert von Vestra, Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier, Ferdinand von Aegir/Hubert von Vestra, Ingrid Brandl Galatea & Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 8
Kudos: 230





	Bloody Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Crimson Flower.

Blood sticks. It’s thick and it clings and it makes it very hard for Hubert to return home at night in a decent state. 

He’s been caught before by servants who look near faint at the sight of him. On a few occasions, Edelgard would be waiting outside her room with a candle burned near to its base and her lips in a tight line. She’d look him up and down and sigh, but she’s learned there’s little point in arguing about the specifics anymore. Someone had to die for their cause, and Hubert took care of it. The whos, whys, and hows matter less and less every year. 

Now he strides though the husk of Garreg Mach, stripped from a school to a military base. He’s gained enough of a reputation among the soldiers that the guards merely nod to him before opening the gate at his arrival. The dark of night and his preferred color of clothing due much to hide the stains, but his presence does more.

Hubert appreciates Edelgard’s choice to wear red. It hides the worst of the wear and tear of their path long enough for her to give speeches to her soldiers after each battle. His own private war doesn’t need an audience, and he relishes enough in the fear that the revulsion of his allies is almost a bonus. 

But Edelgard is different. She should be feared by her enemies, certainly. But she also needs to be loved by the people—loved so fiercely that their adoration can mend some of the gaping holes in her heart left by her siblings and all the people who smacked her hand away when she reached out to them. 

Hubert loves her fiercely enough that he’s able to endure her quiet disapproval late at night for what he puts himself through. He can kill, torture, and slither among the worst of them in the river of blood they’ve spread across Fodlan. 

The idea of Edelgard scurrying like a rat, doing half the things that have become routine for him makes him sicker than the sight of any blood he’s spilled. 

Hubert’s heard stories of hearts harder than hers driving themselves over the edge. The blood doesn’t come off for them, no matter how many times they wash themselves, and he’ll be damned if he lets that fate befall his lady.

When he was young, Hubert trained a black cat to kill the palace rodents. It’d hunt and dispose of them before the nasty creatures could even think of coming near Edelgard. Sometimes she’d scramble away in disgust when the cat would brush up against her white stockings and dribble some not quite dried blood onto them. It wasn’t her favorite system, but Hubert saw the merit in it. 

These days he’s the cat, and he just has to be careful enough to groom away all the blood before stumbling up to his room and Edelgard’s tired eyes. 

Edelgard knows this is the way things have to be. She doesn’t like it, but she doesn’t argue. Unfortunately, not everyone on their path has gotten that through their head.

Ferdinand first took to waiting for him at the foot of the stairs leading up to his room. He’d launch into a lecture with no concern for the ways his voice might carry down the halls and into nearby bedrooms. So Hubert took to cleaning himself up in the kitchen’s washroom. Then, Ferdinand must have caught wind and began staking out the great hall. And so on and so on until tonight when Hubert finds himself trying to clean his face in Garreg Mach’s pond. 

Hubert’s gloves and handkerchief have just about had it. Both are going to be a sick pink at best. A glance down as he takes inventory of himself reveals he forgot to take Bernadetta’s flower off before setting out that night. He turns it over in his bare hands and smirks. It’s fairly amusing to picture himself as a creature of the night, wrecking havoc with his little flower.

But the poor thing is near unsalvageable, too, and he’ll have to ask Bernadetta for another one without revealing the fate of the first. 

And that’s how Ferdinand finds him—sitting at the edge of the dock, still half smeared with blood, and a tiny embroidered flower in his hands. 

He places his hands on his hips and huffs. “Hubert, what are you skulking around here for?”

Hubert doesn’t respond. Underneath his gloves, his hands have been battered and numbed by dark magic, poison mishaps, and so many other terrible things. They’re not cover in blood like the stories, but they can barely feel the delicate stitches of Bernadetta’s flower.

“Hubert?” Ferdinand tries again, and his voice is closer his time. “Hubert, it is the middle of the night. The sooner you respond to me, the sooner we can both retire to bed.”

Maybe that’s the difference between himself and Edelgard. It’s fine if he doesn’t feel—he’d almost prefer it, really. But that fate cannot befall her. So many tried so hard to beat her to numbness, but if he can kill enough rats for her, then maybe she’ll be able to hold on enough that her heart can still know what it’s like to feel afraid—feel anything. 

“Hubert, for goodness sake,” Ferdinand says. He’s kneeling in front of him now, and Hubert sneers, though he doesn’t look up. “Did you bathe yourself in the pond? What in all of Fodlan would compel you to do such a thing? You must be freezing!”

He holds up the flower. “Ferdinand, would you mind commissioning another of these from Bernadetta? Mine appears to have been ruined.”

Ferdinand gives him a befuddled stare before accepting the flower. “I suppose I…” he shakes his head. “Did you truly do your dark… whatever it is you do while wearing this?”

“Yes.”

Ferdinand sighs. “Where has your head been these days? Do you know how much Edelgard has exhausted herself worrying for you? Worrying for your safety while you act behind her back, too!”

Hubert rolls her eyes. “The details need not trouble her.”

“They should and they do,” Ferdinand says. “And even if we were to put aside whatever despicable act we all know you are committing—which I can scarcely bring myself to do!—the fact that you return looking half dead every night troubles all of us.”

“It shouldn’t,” Hubert says. Somehow talking to Ferdinand reignites the near dead fire inside of him after his nights out. “I think I have proven a thousand times over that I am capable of handling myself.”

“Capable or not, this,” Ferdinand seems to gesture to all of him, “this is not healthy. Hubert, you are covered in blood—and most of it is not yours—and your first concern is Bernadetta’s flower?”

“Yes,” Hubert says. “She will be rather upset that it is ruined. Her Majesty also finds it quite amusing and will be saddened by its demise.”

“Edelgard and Bernadetta will live, but, Hubert, if you keep this up, you very well might not.”

“While I have no intention to die, if I must join the corpses on our bloody path, so be it. Now give that to me if you are refusing my request.”

“Hubert.”

Hubert takes a second to straighten himself, and push his wet hair sprawled across his face into a slightly neater array. “You are horrified, yes? That’s good.”

Ferdinand sighs. “Hubert, you must return to your bed. You seem to have taken complete leave of your senses.”

“I have, and that is the point.”

Ferdinand stares him down for another moment, and Hubert knows he’s going to report back to Edelgard about him. The two will whisper about him and demand he take a break or open up or do any number of things that fulfill their definition of healthy.

Hubert does have to return to his room, and Ferdinand walks at his side, murmuring, “We all truly do care for you. If you want to spare us from pain, you have to understand that seeing you like this causes pain as well.”

Hubert nods. “And now you know why I have been attempting to avoid you on nights such as this. Please, ask Bernadetta about the flower.”

Ferdinand clenches his jaw, clearly fighting to say so many things that none of them come out. Instead he says, “I will. Goodnight, Hubert,” before turning away.

Edelgard is outside her room as always when Hubert ascends the stairs. She doesn’t waste time on a greeting. “Ferdinand already spoke to you?”

“The two of you conspired against me?”

“Yes,” she says. She takes another look over him. “And it seems you have bested us.”

He nods. “It is for the best. Goodnight, Your Majesty.” 

“El.”

Hubert closes his door.

-

Blood hurts. Sylvain thinks he’d tear out the poison himself and hand it to Miklan if he could. 

The Lance of Ruin is heavy and it pulse in time with his heart beat. Whatever’s inside of him responds to something innate in it. The two fuel each other and allow him to strike down his enemies, inherit house Gautier, and attract women by the wagonload. 

But whenever it radiates energy and reacts to the poison inside of him, he remembers what he saw in the tower. Professor Byleth was pretty, and staring at her and her assets everyday sounded far better than Professor Hanneman’s wrinkled face. The fact that Hanneman wouldn’t shut up about Crests may have also driven him to it, but Ingrid managed to spread the preferable story—that he was just a skirt chaser and not a cowardly, rotten person who should have drowned in that well—all on her own. Then Professor Byleth’s class got assigned to hunt down Miklan.

Really, they were hunting the Lance of Ruin. It was worth more than Miklan, after all. 

Sylvain was there when the lance pulsed wrong, and black sludge poured out of it and consumed him for having the wrong blood. He died screaming and in pain, and Sylvain knew he got what he deserved. The realization, the sheer blandness where grief should have been only fueled the rot.

Ingrid whispered to him that it was really okay if he needed to take a break from classes and she was always there if he needed someone to talk to. Sylvain flipped the request and invited her to tea with a wink if she really wanted to chat with him that badly. She huffed and walked away, mumbling how unbelievable he was under her breath.

Really, Ingrid’s kind of stupid to brush him off. He’s rich, he’s got a Crest, and she’s got one, too. A marriage between them could fix all her problems, even though Sylvain thinks he might hate her for it. 

Felix rolled his eyes when Sylvain mentioned it. “Of course she isn’t interested in you. She knows you.”

“Ah, you wound me,” Sylvain said. “Am I really that unbearable?”

“Yes,” Felix said. “But she’s unbearable, too, so maybe you would make a decent match.”

“I’m starting to think you think everyone is unbearable.”

“Yes. Because you all are.”

Sylvain laughed. Felix didn’t. But maybe that was why he liked Felix so much—he’d tell him how poisonous and disgusting he was and it wasn’t a joke. There was really nothing funny about him. 

Felix found him when he was at the bottom of the well. His tiny face peeked over the edge and called down to ask why he was possibly down there. Sylvain just smiled back and said he was too adventurous for his own good. Felix had rolled his eyes, but he did go to get help. Sylvain thinks he might hate Felix a little bit for that, but sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the things he hates. 

He didn’t hate that Felix eventually joined him in their new class. Sylvain patted his shoulder, and Felix shoved him off with far more force than necessary. “I didn’t do it for you.”

That wasn’t a joke either. Felix had confessed to him that Dimitri had another meltdown, and Felix had another round of crying wolf. It was all too much, and Dimitri’s poison finally pushed Felix away. 

Sylvain said, “It’s still good to have you.” He wondered how long it would be until the poison in his blood exhausted Felix, too. “Now let me give you a run down about the girls in this class. So there are two you can’t hit on—it’ll cause an international incident. But, hey, that leaves two left, and there are two of us.”

“I’d rather choke on glass than accompany you on one of your pathetic dates.”

Sylvain smiled. “Good to see you’re still as much fun as you were when I left.”

Then, Felix told him to shut up. Maybe that’s why he liked Felix. No amount of precious poison would stop him from telling Sylvain to stick his dick in a cactus when he deserved it. 

Then, things got complicated. Felix was still with him, and Felix looked down at his father with dead eyes for only a second before drawing his sword again. Felix didn’t care about honor or nobility or Crests. Maybe that’s why it was so easy for him to follow Sylvain when all the stuff Edelgard started saying about Crests started to make too much sense to him. The lines of countries were arbitrary for Felix, and Faerghus’s chivalry was a scam that got good men and women killed. 

Ingrid liked it, though. And the last time Sylvain saw her, she was a knight, riding high on her pegasus above the battle down below, diving in and out of combat at a moment’s notice. Ingrid told him that she wasn’t afraid of death—Glenn wasn’t afraid of death, so she wouldn’t be either. Glenn was also probably why Felix found it so easy to turn his back on his father’s corpse. 

They both had the poison, but that didn’t matter. They cared about people, and people cared about them. Ingrid and Felix weren’t disposable, yet her pegasus still fell and when the war was done, Felix still disappeared. 

But before that, all Felix could say about Ingrid’s death is that she should have known better than to become a knight. 

Sylvain just kept marching on because there wasn’t anything he could say. Even he knew there was only so much he could blame the poison on. Sometimes it was just him. He relied on it that way—as long as it was there, he had a reason for why he was so toxic. It was a nice lie; if he was just born without it, he’d be different, he’d be good, he and Miklan would have gotten along and he would have cried like Felix did when his brother died. 

In the world he was fighting for, his blood wouldn’t be any excuse. Everything Edelgard said made sense, but sometimes Sylvain wished the fighting would last forever. As long as there wasn’t an end where all the poison was sucked out and he was stuck with just himself, he could go on. 

But people were dying, and he was a disgusting person to wish for something like that. So when Felix cleans the blood off his sword, Sylvain just smiles and does the same for the lance that killed Miklan. 

As the battles go on, Sylvain wonders if he could bleed enough to collect enough blood to make a whole other Sylvain. And then maybe that Sylvain could be good and get married and pop out a dozen Crest babies. Maybe that Sylvain would have greater ambitions than dying quickly and with relatively little pain in battle.

It almost seems wrong that when Dimitri dies, there’s no one there to collect all of his precious blood into a bucket and stop it from soaking into the mud. 

-

Blood deceives. It’s twofaced, really. Linhardt can stand it in theory—in a lab. But when it’s in front of him, pouring down someone’s face or a new gaping hole in their chest, he feels as if every book he poured over on blood has been piled on top of his lungs.

His first up-close-and-personal interaction came young. He had been napping under a tree on his family’s estate. Then he heard hurried, stumbling footsteps through the grass and Caspar’s voice whining for him to wakeup. Linhardt refused until Caspar’s grubby hands forcibly shook him to consciousness. He blinked his groggy eyes open to a sea of blood from a cut on Caspar’s forehead, dyeing his round little face in red.

Linhardt made an effort to learn just enough healing magic so that in the future, he could lift a hand to Capar’s injury of the hour to whip the nausea away. Part of it was out of concern for his friend, but much of it was for the sake of his stomach. 

Caspar would chirp, “Thanks, Lin!” and run off to bloody himself anew. 

Linhardt is far, far too acquainted with Caspar’s blood. It’s a foul thing, too. His more intimate relationship with it aside, his books and the mumblings back and forth of his parents thoroughly convinced him that blood has ruined Caspar’s life. If his blood was shiny and pure enough to be encrusted with one of the symbols in Linhardt’s books, then he wouldn’t have to go out to fight and drench himself in the stuff. 

But it’s hard for Linhardt not to think of himself as well. Cethleann cursed him to a life of paperwork and estate management and whatever else noble are forced to do. He ran after Caspar to Garreg Mach to run away from the responsibilities Cethleann hoisted upon him, at least for a time. 

He summons his own Crest, and the power feels so warm and bright. It sows Caspar’s skin back together so well and so fast that he hops right out of the battle’s sidelines and back to the fray. Linhardt can’t help but study the lines and the feelings and inherent beauty of his Crest, even when the resentment sets in.

Linhardt has another memory. 

In beautiful Derdriu, he sat with his legs dangling over the sparkling water running through the canals. The battle had been fierce but they spent most of it away from the city on ships, and all the blood flowed out and away into the ocean. Edelgard was rather rattled from the experience of fighting on shaky decks instead of solid ground, and they had all been allowed to rest and wait while she composed herself.

The others all went off to explore and sightsee as if they were on holiday. Linhardt liked the idea of being on holiday, so he hummed and watched the water while the thick smell of copper fled to the sea. 

Caspar nearly got his head chopped off in the fight. The wyvern rider had dived just a bit too low, and their blade made its home in his clavicle instead of his neck. With the battle over, Linhardt could take the time to mend the patchwork magic he had strung over it when he was a ship away with his own wyvern problems to worry about.

Caspar winced when Linhardt placed his hands on the sore, healing wound. It had a thick coating of dried blood, which turned Linhardt’s stomach, but it flaked off relatively easily with a few splashes of water that just barely didn’t turn into the two of them behaving like children in the canals. 

Linhardt felt the warmth pass through him when he cast his spell, and his hand glowed brighter than usual as Cethleann’s Crest manifested itself. In the peace and quiet, he could focus it, make it grow, and Linhardt turned them into a tiny beacon of gentle, soothing light. 

Caspar ran one of his coarse hands over the dainty healed scar. His chest was still splotchy with blood, but the wound was a clean stripe over his otherwise battered torso. 

It was an image Linhardt decided he liked. Caspar in one piece, grinning at him, while the remnants of his healing magic made his body glow with a health no normal person could ever truly possess. 

“Thanks, Lin!”

And his goofy smile and too hard clap on the back ruined all the romance that Linhardt had to laugh.

Saint Cethleann never married, but Linhardt thinks that that history would be different if any of the soldiers she tended to had a drop of whatever blood fueled Caspar.

And then there’s now. 

Linhardt never minded the rain, but Caspar hates thunder. He gave Caspar a stupid little charm to protect from lightning strikes when they were little, and he wore the damn thing on a chain around his neck every day, rain or shine. 

Linhardt pushes it out of the way when he rips open Caspar’s armor as well as he can. The rain pitter pattering around them wipes it clean. 

Rhea appeared out of nowhere before retreating back into the woods, leaving Dimitri to die. But before she left, her sword—running on her own demonic blood—had slashed and burned, almost cauterizing the wounds the same moment it created them. 

Petra had expertly dipped and dodged to avoid her attacks and land enough strikes to send her running. But Caspar had never been as quick on his feet.

The blood is everywhere, and Caspar keeps trying to sit up and rasp out his name while Linhardt puts out as many bleeding fires as he can in the rain. 

“Lin, Lin,” he says. “I-I’m okay now. Really—you can stop. I’m okay.”

Linhardt’s hands are dyed red from where he put his hands directly on the mouth of the river. His face is splashed with the stuff, and even strands of his hair that came loose in his panic are soaked. 

Caspar pulls him close, further coating both of them, and Linhardt finds some reprieve when he buries his face into Caspar’s neck. He can still smell it, but with his eyes close tight he can pretend it’s not as bad as it is until he gets his breathing and shaking under control.

His entire body feels numb from the cold, the rain, and the horror. Caspar says something to Petra, likely drenched herself, that Linhardt can’t be bothered to pay attention to. Then Caspar is trying to stand, pulling Linhardt awkwardly along with him.

“Come on, Lin,” he says. “We have to go. The others need help.”

Linhardt had felt his Crest activate when he healed Caspar, and it had been so effective in putting him back together that the two could charge right back. Linhardt doesn’t respond with anything more than a mumble while Caspar repositions them so Linhardt’s arm is around his shoulders. 

As they stumble forward, Linhardt gets the chance to look down at himself and see the new color of his clothes until he faints to see the same darkness he had when Caspar was a child, shaking him awake with a bloody face.

**Author's Note:**

> There were so many characters I could have picked for this, but I thought these three each had very unique relationships with blood that they felt like they'd make the best contrasts for each other. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
